Saturday, 7 June 2014

James Joyce, the Church and the State

As usual around June, I take
down Ulysses for some more good-humoured updates on what happens on Bloomsday.
This year my reading coincides with news of the latest church scandal from
Ireland, the gruesome revelations about the remains of nearly 800 children
found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. The children died
between 1925 and 1961 while under the care of the Bon Secours nuns. Other
graves are also being uncovered.

One is forced to make
connections of meaning between what James Joyce is saying in Ulysses and the
stories coming out about Magdalen laundries, child sexual abuse, and now these
mass graves. The iron power of the Catholic Church in Ireland is object of his
continuous satire in Ulysses, a power that only became entrenched after the
Civil War. At times the satire goes on too long, Joyce seems unable to restrain
himself from questioning the Church through the cleverness of his art. It makes
one see that, whether in 1904 or after, simply no one was allowed to ask any
questions of the internal power of the Church in Ireland. Yet Joyce sees
intuitively that the Church is trapped too by its own influence in this world.

Catholicism, under Eamon De
Valera and others, was used as the moral basis and guide of the Irish State. In
the same year that Ulysses was published (1922) De Valera was instituting, in
the sudden absence of any other model, a form of restrictive Catholic
nationhood. And as the Australian lawyer Kieran Tapsell has drawn to our
attention recently, 1922 was the year Pope Pius XI issued the decree Crimen
Sollicitationis, “that created a de facto ‘privilege of clergy’ by imposing the
‘secret of the Holy Office’ on all information obtained through the Church’s
canonical investigations.” In real terms, this meant that the State not only
would not, but could not, question the actions of the Catholic clergy or
religious. They could act without fear of exposure, virtually a law unto
themselves.

It was a diabolical
situation. While we now blame the Church alone for what happened in parishes
and religious houses, actually the Church under De Valera and beyond was used
as an extension of the State. It was locked into the process. Church houses did
what the State couldn’t do because it didn’t have the funds. The Catholic
moralism of De Valera’s Ireland is a grim thing to behold from this distance.
It was a kind of ideological puritanism, of the very kind depicted in comic
measure in Ulysses, which after 1922 turned Ireland almost into a kind of
theocratic republic, in which any alternative to the Church line was ignored or
publicly rejected.

Dire poverty was Ireland’s
biggest challenge. We know this to be the case in 1904 too, where in Ulysses
virtually every character owes somebody something; borrowing and gambling are
two of the main economic activities; pastimes, really. Because the State could
not support unmarried mothers and their children, it passed the responsibility
to the Church. The religious orders were left to run the homes like businesses, with
the babies sold into adoption, the mothers forced into hard labour in the
laundries. The State was relieved of responsibility and the Church protected
itself from scrutiny or investigation. The clergy and religious were left with
enormous powers over the most vulnerable women and children in society. There
was power without unaccountability,

judgementalism
without compassion.

Ulysses contains other
forewarnings of what could happen in a place like Dublin. For example, we have Molly Bloom, who is a
huge irrepressible reminder to Irish readers of sexuality. In fact, sexuality
is one of her prime messages; Joyce never allows us to forget her sexuality
through the whole book. Sexuality, that is the very thing being suppressed by
the Church, with devastating results, as we see in these latest reports. Where
the body is thought of as sinful, when the body is seen at all, then it becomes
permitted by those in control to punish the sinful body, to treat the sinful
body with indifference. The Church authorities were guilty of the heresy of
Manichaeism. Joyce grasped this fact and we can only marvel at his relentless
celebration of the human body in Ulysses. Sexuality, as an integral fact of
being human and having a body, is therefore celebrated as well.

The Tuam revelations raise
other major questions about Dublin in the early 20th century, such
as, where are the fathers of these
children? Are they the Blazes Boylans of the world? We think too of the
Maternity Hospital scenes later in Ulysses, where the women give birth while
the men all drink and make filthy jokes. What is Joyce saying about Dublin in
1904? Are the men just drinking the whole time? Joyce softens the picture with
the presence of experienced souls like Leopold Bloom, but the overall image
remains problematic. And are the women really all alone, left to sort out the
realities? Something missing from Ulysses is the network of women (and men, at
times) who must have worked to protect mothers and children from a fate at the
hands of the authorities. It is Bloom, the solitary and sensitive networker,
who works against the prevailing indulgences.

And lastly, in this context
we look at the portrayal of children in Ulysses. We ask what Joyce thinks of
childhood and children. The scene stays in the mind in which one of Simon
Dedalus’s daughters seeks money for food. There is no hope offered, let alone
something to go on with. The father is, typically, caught up in his own daily
interests rather than in those of his own family. The gap between the adults
and children is profound, something Joyce makes clear too in the classroom
scene that morning where Stephen displays little empathy or time for the
students in his charge. So while Ulysses treats the transition from youth to
age as a main theme, what are we to make of the absence of analysis about the
transition from childhood to youth?